546
by Maya Sushi
Summary: Tonight, he cannot sleep, and tonight, there are five-hundred-forty-six reasons why he is a horrible brother. Tonight, he will count them. Somewhere along the line, he will lose track.


_**Disclaimer: **_I do not own Fullmetal Alchemist!

_**A/N: **_Hey! It's short, yes, it came into my head from nowhere too. I was just sitting there and then all the sudden my thoughts were like, "Tonight, there are five-hundred-forty-six reasons why he is a horrible brother." and I was like, "That's not true, he's a wonderful brother! He's the best brother!" Then I wrote this! :)

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Tonight, he cannot sleep.

It is dark tonight, so dark that he cannot see across the room to Alphonse. When he turns onto his side and searches with his eyes he finds nothing, and she shivers with the absence of it. There are no stars out his window. It is dark enough that he can reach, he can reach his hand out for his brother and not fear he will notice. He can close his fingers around air and he can feel that moment in which everything he loved was ripped away, gone, just gone, by his own doing. He can revel in this pain. He can deserve it, alone, in the dark. Tonight, he is forsaken.

Tonight, he cannot sleep, and tonight, there are five-hundred-forty-six reasons why he is a horrible brother.

Yesterday, there were five-hundred-forty-two. Tomorrow, there will be more.

The hue-less air is so heavy and corporeal that he can scarcely even imagine what the world beyond his bed should look like. It is so heavily ridden by fog, by a cloak of night that conceals and morphs and twists all the things that he knows – that he has carefully created and structured in a way so that they cannot be concealed and morphed and twisted, yet still they are – and makes them into horrible counter-realities. Biting orifices filled with fangs to latch onto every loose end that he has left untied and chew until they reach a vein, to spill his blood and unleash whatever essence is trapped within him that forces the world to stay locked inside. What fetters these things to his heart? His blood runs cold with the weight of it, his every fluid, sanguine or not, coagulates with this heaviness, until all that is left inside of him is the cruor of a million clots within him. He feels as if he will never move again.

Maybe, though, he will turn to his side, and he will reach for his brother.

Tonight, he will count them. Somewhere along the line, he will lose track.

He will start over.

Tonight, he cannot sleep.

He won't.

Hardly a single difference can be found between the grime of his vision through the perception of his eyes or behind the shadow of his lids, so they hesitate to fall. At least without their cover he has a semblance of control. In his mind this does not exist, and he does not fool himself into thinking that it does. He does not humor that possibility for even the smallest of moments. He challenges his reality, instead, he looks forward on into the soiled black of his world and he remembers that – when he turns to his side, when he reaches forward – his brother is on the other side. And he must, it is his incumbency, his one obligatory pledge, one which he willingly attained, he must push through this. All of it. All of the hindrances that dance just beyond the edges of his misgiving vision, they have to go, he has to push through all of this, if he ever wants to move, ever wants to get anywhere at all.

Tonight, he cannot sleep.

Tonight, he is a horrible brother, and he will be a horrible brother tomorrow, and the day after that. Each day there will be another reason, another unthinkable mistake or regret that will join the others in their silent brooding despair. But he will wait. In the dark. He will wait.

One day, when the dark is gone, he will find what was always there, on the other side. One day, he will sweep it all away, every inch of it, of ash and death and pain, and he will do what he has been trying to do for so very long. He will await the day that he reaches out with a steady hand to take all the shattered fragments of their lives and piece them back together again.

Tonight, he cannot sleep.

Perhaps tomorrow will be the night he can.


End file.
